The Lion and the Foxes: Elite Circulation and Argentina’s Crisis

It is the view of Chainsawnomics that Javier Milei, the Lion, is forcing Argentina through a process of elite circulation in the sense described by Vilfredo Pareto. A new, aggressive, and ideologically coherent organised minority is attempting to displace an exhausted ruling class that shaped the Corporatist Republic for nearly a century. Since the political construction of Argentina in 1776, the country has passed through four distinct political regimes, each defined by a characteristic elite structure and political formula. The last of which may now be entering its terminal phase.

Argentina’s prolonged economic and political crisis is best understood as a failure of elite circulation rather than as a series of isolated policy errors. Drawing on the classical elite theories of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, this essay interprets Argentina’s modern history as a transition from an open liberal elite to a closed corporatist ruling class sustained by an expanding bureaucratic class and entrenched clientelist networks. Within this framework, Javier Milei emerges as a response to a structural imbalance: the reintroduction of “lion” instincts (“residues”) expelled by a fox-dominated elite. The central question is whether the forces released by disruption can institutionalise the structural supports that were absent when the Liberal Republic collapsed.

“A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves.”
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. XVIII

This article draws on the classical Italian tradition of elite theory to explain why this process is occurring, why it is conflictual, and what determines whether it succeeds or fails. The argument proceeds in four steps. It first outlines the mechanics of elite circulation, then examines Argentina’s liberal and corporatist cycles, before applying the lion–fox framework to the present moment and assessing whether genuine elite renewal is possible.

The Circulation of Elites

Elite theory begins by rejecting the idea of “rule of the people” in any form of government, including democracy. Every society is instead divided between an organised ruling minority and a disorganised ruled majority.

Taken together, these insights form a realist framework that can be summarised as follows:

1. Elites are always minorities, composed of the very few at the top of each domain.
2. Society is divided into the non-elite and the elite, the latter split into (a) governing and (b) non-governing segments. The governing elite consists of those who “directly or indirectly play some considerable part in government”.
3. Power is never unipersonal. Even monarchies govern through coalitions of social forces.
4. Every governing elite rests on a broader second stratum of leadership capacity. Without it, organisation is impossible.
5. Ruling classes legitimise their power through a political formula, a moral and legal narrative that presents domination as necessary and just.
6. Political systems combine two principles of selection: autocratic (top-down) and liberal (bottom-up).
7. Organisation inevitably produces oligarchy, generating a tendency toward elite closure.
8. At the same time, pressures from below create a constant demand for renewal.
9. Elite circulation is essential for stability. When it slows or stops, quality accumulates outside the ruling class and violent disruption follows:

“From time to time the river overflows and violent disturbances occur. There is a flood. Afterwards, the new governing élite again resumes its slow transformation.”
Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, §2056

The Liberal Republic Cycle (1853–1930)

After 1853, Argentina constituted itself as a Liberal Republic in Mosca’s sense: federal structure, constitutional rule, and free enterprise. It began aristocratic but developed strong democratic tendencies through immigration, economic growth, and public education. Elite circulation functioned effectively. New immigrants ascended economically and socially. By 1918, free and competitive elections brought the Radical Civic Union (UCR) to power without institutional rupture.

The political formula of this period is best expressed in the Preamble of the Constitution. It established rule by representatives rather than direct popular sovereignty, grounding authority in transcendent principles. Its moral basis lay in universal aims: union, justice, peace, defense, general welfare, and liberty, framed within a civilising mission open to “all men of the world.”

This was an Enlightenment-derived liberal constitutional order, confident in law, progress, and openness.

The Corporatist Republic Cycle (1930–2023?)

The collapse of the Liberal Republic did not abolish elite rule. It transformed its social composition, ideological justification, and mechanisms of reproduction.

Mass immigration had created a large urban middle class. Rapid growth opened elite positions increasingly filled by first- and second-generation immigrants, who brought with them the ideas then dominant in Europe: corporatism, economic planning, and nationalism. These ideas took root among the professional classes that staffed the state, the military, universities, the judiciary, unions, and the media.

After the 1929 crisis, the 1930 coup marked a decisive shift. It was carried out by a faction of the army, legitimised by the courts, justified by the press, and welcomed by crisis-hit urban sectors. What followed was not a single rupture but a cycle of coups, weak democratic governments, and recurrent crises.

Power shifted away from the landed elite of the agro-export free-trade era toward a new minority of industrialists, bureaucrats, and intellectuals who seized control of an expanding state and used it to entrench protectionist policies in their favour. Peronism did not create this model. It radicalised and popularised it by mobilising labour and redistributing income, while leaving intact the professional and military composition of the governing elite.

The political formula evolved accordingly. In stylised form, it ran as follows:

“The will of the people demands a government of national unity to guarantee order, deliver social justice, mobilise resources in the sovereign interest, develop national industry, and combat speculative capital and the oligarchy, aligned with foreign imperialism.”

With minor variations, this formula proved acceptable across civilian and military governments alike. After 1983, elections became widely accepted and the military withdrew as an overt political actor. The elite, however, remained largely closed, bureaucratic, and hostile to market discipline.

The Doom of the Autocratic Principle

Pareto, following Machiavelli, distinguished between foxes, who rule through cunning and manipulation, and lions, who rule through force and decisiveness. Stable elites require both. Over time, however, ruling classes tend to become dominated by foxes.

Elites decay not only in size but in quality. Vigour declines. Lions are excluded. Authority shifts from enforcement to procedure and fraud. Eventually, elites become unwilling and unable to defend the system they control, while capable individuals accumulate outside the ruling class.

Mosca warned that excessive bureaucratic expansion marks the terminal phase of political systems. As the state expands, taxation rises, incentives weaken, production declines, and social exhaustion follows. Argentina exhibits each of these symptoms.

In Argentina, the corporatist state’s autocratic logic hardened into an aristocratic tendency, expressed through systematic barriers to elite circulation:

• Expansion of the state and bureaucracy
• Cooptation of universities through intervention and funding
• Erosion of merit-based entry into public offices
• Proliferation of regulation, subsidies, and state enterprises
• Control of media and cultural narratives
• Weakening of the forces of order
• Informal power networks dependent on discretionary favours

Taken together, these measures, often cloaked in egalitarian rhetoric, produced elite closure. They subsidised the managerial middle class, reinforced endogamic reproduction of professional elites, and marginalised or expelled higher-quality elements away from the ruling class.

The Roar of the Lion

Within this framework, Milei should be understood not as an ideological outlier but as the product of a closed system reaching its limits.

He represents a reaction against a long-entrenched corporatist governing class, which he confronts openly rather than accommodating. What has been described here as the Corporatist Republic corresponds to what he calls “the model of the caste”: a closed ecosystem of political, bureaucratic, and protected economic interests.

His discourse is explicitly anti-corporatist. Politicians are portrayed as a self-perpetuating political class, protected business groups as beneficiaries of regulation, and publicly funded media and cultural institutions as extensions of state power. The language is moral rather than technocratic. Its aim is not to refine policy trade-offs but to question legitimacy itself.

For decades, successive governments promised to modernise the state, improve efficiency, introduce market reforms, or restore fiscal discipline. These efforts failed not because of execution but because they were attempted from within the same elite framework they sought to correct.

Milei rejected this approach. He attacked the political settlement directly and in public. His target was legitimacy, not policy detail. By denying the moral premises of the corporatist order, he denied the ruling elite its justificatory language.

In Pareto’s terms, Milei reintroduces lion residues that corporatist systems systematically expel. His confrontational style is not incidental. Fox-dominated elites do not relinquish power through persuasion. They yield only when the political formula sustaining them collapses.

Will a New Elite Take Over?

It is still too early to tell. Structural change requires not only the displacement of a decayed elite but the formation of a new one.

There are reasons for cautious optimism. The old ruling class shows little capacity to adapt meaningfully to the shock it has absorbed. At the same time, a new cohort of lions has emerged, first organised through X and then assembled into a full-scale political party in record time. Milei himself, contrary to initial expectations, has also demonstrated fox-like instincts, avoiding obvious traps, fracturing hostile media narratives, securing the backing of the security forces, establishing a foothold in Congress, and attracting support from segments of the cultural sphere.

Having weakened the prevailing political formula, the confrontation is now extending into the remaining centres of elite reproduction: universities, unions, the judiciary, provincial power structures, and the administrative state. The conflict has moved beyond electoral politics.

The struggle is being fought on multiple fronts, but its decisive arena is cultural. Control over legitimacy, language, and moral authority will determine whether elite circulation resumes or stalls. Elite theory offers no guarantees. Disruption alone is not renewal. The question is whether the forces released by disruption can institutionalise and provide the structural supports that were absent when the Liberal Republic collapsed. In Pareto’s terms, the problem is not choosing between lions and foxes, but preventing either from ruling alone for too long.